WOW - How did you meet your closest friend?

Hello lovely people,

We here, Arpita and Swarnali have been friends for over a year now and today, we would love to share with you all how it all started.

Swarnali Says - Knowing Arpita has been nothing less than a miracle for me. As Coelho had said, the "universe" conspired to bring us together. Being a thousand miles apart, it was practically impossible for Arpi and I to know each other. But then, the magic happened. Arpi and I would have never known each other if not for our common friend , Koustabh. And how I know Koustabh is yet another tale.

Year 2010 - K and I are from the same school. The only thing is, he left the school when he moved to Delhi, a month before I joined. So, he was just somebody I had heard of and never met. But our dear God had some other plans. Five years later, one fine day I find myself talking to K. He had come to meet an old friend of his who was my neighbour and I don't know how, he ends up chatting with my mum instead. And I come out to see him merrily talking to her and we are introduced. No awkward smiles or handshakes, we just gelled the moment we met ; it was like we were meant to be friends.
Time just flew by as we stood there happily talking. Things got even better when we realised we were studying the same subject for our bachelors degree. He had to leave for Delhi the very next day and we parted with a promise to stay in touch. I had already known that I made a friend for life.

Year 2011 - K and I were friends on Facebook. Thank God for FB, I met some of my closest and oldest friends there. So another fine day, I check K's photographs from college and I leave a funny remark on one. The next moment I get a notification that a mutual friend named Arpita Mahapatra had liked my comment. For no reason, I go and check her profile and I happened to like her status messages. And for some random reason which I haven't been able to figure yet, I send her a friend request (normally, I would never send random requests to people who just happened to like my comment). Almost a month later, I get a message on my FB inbox from someone called Arpita Mahapatra who apologises for having not accepted my friend request. As you might have understood by now, I had totally forgotten who she was. And a series of messages later, we are friends on Facebook.

Year 2012 – Arpi asks me to join this book review blog called www.alotofpages.com and on a whim, I decide to join and things never looked back for us. ALOP helped us connect over our mutual love for books and there started the unending chain of emails and chats that continues even now.
There hasn’t been a single day since then that I haven’t talked to Arpi. She is like this doppelganger who knows exactly I am feeling and knows just what to say. From agreeing with me when I needed somebody to repeat just what I said to showing me the flip side to the coin when I needed to see a different perspective and hearing me out when I went totally crazy ranting and whining, Arpi has proven to be the best friend I had always wanted. Not that I didn't connect with anybody else before, but with her things just fell into places like never before. I didn't have to try to be somebody for I knew she wouldn't judge and love me for everything I am. We have this weird connection that we can’t seem to explain to ourselves and yet we know how real that is.

September 2012- Arpi and I meet for the first time and it didn't feel like we were meeting for the first time. We hugged and laughed and talked like crazy , endlessly for those an hour and half that she was in Kolkata and it happens to be my fave memory from the year.

Arpita Says - So, the next time anybody tries to convince you that fairy tales don't happen, DON'T believe them. Fairy tales, magic and miracles are as true as true can be. And we tell it because it happened to us. They think marriages are made in heaven? Well then, so are some friendships. How else do you explain finding someone in your life who is just the kind of person you've always imagined to be an ideal friend? Everyone expects different things from friends, we all have our own criteria- and Swarnali made my definition of a true friend come to life.

I am the kind of person who relishes the idea of knowing people who live far away- but I'm also excessively cautious about who I befriend, particularly when it comes to Facebook. (Yes, I'm paranoid. So?) I almost always ask common friends whether the person sending me a friend request is reliable (if it's a guy) and interesting to talk to (if it's a girl). I remember asking our common friend Koustabh, whether Swarnali and I have anything in common because it's a pain adding someone and not knowing what to say next in the middle of a chat. He laughed, and told me we are quite similar (neither of us had really known then, just how right he was!) since we are both interested in literature, are feminists and unique (I still wonder what he meant by that).

I guess one reason why Swarnali and have turned out to be so close is that we are completely at ease being ourselves when we talk to each other- as in, being weird and silly, confused and angry, insecure and surprisingly proud at different points of time. We could any day pretend to be someone else, considering we don't get to see each other often; but it feels like, no matter what, we would adore- and not just 'accept'- one another just the way we are.

What started as casual chatting on a social networking site, turned out to be a lasting friendship which became much more strong and special than those we have with most people we see every other day. The day we met, feels like a dream now- it seems to good to be true. We met at the airport- I was waiting for the connecting flight- and we barely had time to let it sink in that we are meeting at last, when I had to leave. Yet, that didn't stop us from making the most of it. The little time we had made it obvious that we would have become friends had we just bumped into each other some day, standing in a queue somewhere, or waiting at the bus stop. Our conversation was free flowing; one topic just led to another and that kept us from moaning about how unfair it is that we hardly have a day to spend together. 

The best bit was realizing we are not at all conscious around each other; neither of us felt the need to sit like we are at a job interview, check whether our hair looks right, or talk like we are meeting our in-laws. We cracked jokes at the expense of our common friends; Swarnali easily got along with my Mum and little sister (both of them later told my Dad what a charming person she is) and we wondered how cool it would have been had we lived in the same city. When we parted, we knew already that our 'first meeting' would be a hot topic of discussion for years to come. And we weren't wrong- it still creates a stir when we tell our new friends about it. This came as a perfect opportunity to share the story with you too.

So how did you meet your best friend? Tell us in the comments :)

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda

Till Next,